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Last week, in honor of my impending birthday situation, my Mom and I made a bunch of cookies for other people in exchange for their donations to Autostraddle. I was super-helpful throughout the process and not even remotely distracted by g-chatting with Cee about the impending launch of our redesign. After Mom and I finished our bake-a-thon, I packaged up all the baked goods with great care and put them in the mail, where they will journey across land and sea and then jump into your mouths like tiny birds!

Although we offered meringue cookies and sugar cookies as options, nobody picked those, so I’m just including here the recipes that we did actually make. ARE YOU READY?

Chocolate Mint Brownies

1. Pre-heat your oven to 325 degrees. This is really difficult so be sure to focus.

2. Mix all the ingredients on that list together in the order in which they are listed.

3. Bake those items for 20-25 minutes in a greased “jelly roll pan.” You know, that pan you keep around for jelly roll emergencies. Who doesn’t love a good jelly roll. My day hasn’t begun or ended until I’ve ingested a jelly roll. I’m sure lots of you can relate.

4. Let that cool for a bit while we move gallantly forward to the second level. “Next level,” if you will.

2. Spread the chocolatey mixture of goodness all over the green layer.

3. Refrigerate that pan until the brownies settle in to their best selves.

When it’s nice and cool, you should cut it in diamond shapes. I obviously didn’t do that, because who still has the index card around when the brownies have emerged from the oven? Not me obviously. Instead I cut them in a variety of haphazard shapes using a pizza cutter and ate all the crumbly bits.

Criss-Cross Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

Source: Appears to have been removed from The Ann Arbor News and pasted onto a printed-out recipe for “Girl Scout Mint Cookies.” According to the printer time-stamp, this occurred on April 3rd, 1998.

1. Beat sugar, peanut butter and margarine until it’s nice and creamy, much like what happens when you beat a vagina. Next, you’re gonna add the water, egg, and vanilla, and beat that real good too.

2. Combine oats, flour, and baking soda and mix well. I’d recommend not doing this in a tiny bowl like I did, because then it’s super hard to mix and everybody will want to talk about how you may be real good at writing words but you can’t change a tire or whatever.

3. Drop that oats/flour/soda sitch into the creamy bowl of stuff, and mix it all up.

4. Cover and chill for two whole hours! That’s enough time to re-watch two episodes of Orange is The New Black, or to paint your fingernails and toenails and let them dry.

Funny story: so Geneva made a graphic for the Birthday Bake Sale post for which she pulled photos of the cookie options from various internet locales. Because my Mom had dug up the Vegan Gluten-Free Applesauce Cookies recipe herself, I didn’t have any idea what they were supposed to look like, and therefore did not question the gluteny appearance of the cookies Geneva used for the graphic:

i did not bake any cookies that look like this

Then, we were at Berkeley Bowl playing Shopping Cart Battleship with the entire population of Berkeley and Mom said we needed to get dates for the applesauce cookies, I was super confused because clearly this picture is not a picture of cookies with dates in them. So I e-mailed Geneva to see if maybe we could just make the recipe she pictured, but she regretfully informed me that there was no recipe and that it was from a Civil War history website. Because nobody got me a time machine for my birthday, we forged on just the same. Luckily, our supporter Leigh said she’d eat anything vegan, so I just sent her a box of tin foil. Just kidding tin foil isn’t vegan.

1. Stand really close to the oven, look it in the eyeballs, and tell it that you believe in it and that you believe it can warm itself to three hundred and seventy-five degrees of delight.

2. Beat together sugar, oil, vanilla and salt.

3. Stir in applesauce, pecans, oats and dates.

4. Spread evenly atop a jelly roll pan.

5. Bake in your confident 375-degree oven for 25 minutes or so.

It sort of turns out to be more like a granola bar type situation, like something you might wanna eat tiny pieces of all morning when you haven’t made breakfast yet but are ambiently hungry.

Magic Bars / 7-Layer Bars / Hello Dolly Bars

Source: I found this recipe on a can of sweetened condensed milk in the late ’80s

2. Cut the butter into pieces and melt it in the microwave until it’s “just melted when stirred.” I have no idea what that means honestly so I just kinda relied on my natural animal instincts to guide me home.

3. Mix up graham cracker crumbs up with the butter. This is gonna be your “crust.” You then spread this mixture all over the 8 x 8 inch pan until it’s nice and covered. Just really let your fingers do the talking.

4. Then you sort of hang out and toss things on top of the crust: chocolate chips, pecans, coconut flakes and peanut butter chips until it looks suitably delicious. The recipe actually calls for butterscotch chips, but when I was 8 and I first made these, I knew peanut butter chips would be even more delightful, so that’s how I made them ever since. Now that I think about it, butterscotch would’ve been good too, maybe I’ll try that next time. I hope everybody who orders them enjoys the peanut butter. Life is full of these kinds of conundrums, you know? Life is a bowl of cherries and a maze of butterscotch.

5. Then you pour the sweetened condensed milk over the whole mixture. I find it helps to approach it like a Toaster Strudel at first, and then go back filling in the gaps. That’s not what I did, but it’s what I wish I’d done.

Technically this recipe also calls for chopped nuts but I’ve never understood why people wanna put nuts into their chocolate chip cookies.

1. Dance energetically around the oven until you’re confident it can handle heating itself to 375 degrees.

2. Mix sugars, butter, vanilla and egg in a large bowl. Then stir in the flour, baking soda and salt. The dough will be a little stiff, but you will be able to deal with this because you’re a grown-up. Then stir in the chocolate chips.

4. Bake 8-10 minutes or until golden brown. Golden brown is such a thing in the world of baking.

5. Cool, remove from sheet, and put them in a drying rack and/or in your mouthpiece.

my mom was not excited about me taking this picture

There you have it! The best Get Baked ever of all time. Now that you’ve made all these cookies, you can basically just sit on your butt and eat for the rest of your life forever. That’s what I plan on doing for the rest of my life. And although it’s too late to get cookies, there’s still time to donate to the Autostraddle Writer’s Fund! We’ve already hit $5,000, which means another International Meet-Up Week is coming your way, and if we hit $10,000, we’ll be raffling off a 20% A-Camp Discount for life coupon and two $50 gift cards for the Autostraddle Store.

Riese is the 34-year-old CEO, CFO and Editor-in-Chief of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, blogger, fictionist, copywriter, video-maker and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York City and mellowed out in California before returning to the Detroit area to be a grown-up. Her work has appeared in nine books including "The Bigger the Better The Tighter The Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image & Other Hazards Of Being Female," magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! Follow her on twitter and instagram.

This is where my girlfriend is supposed to read this article and think to herself: “I should make that 7-Layer bar situation for my overworked, stressed out, cold and flu riddled girlfriend.” No pressure babe.

Hello Dolly bars- this recipe has been around 4-ever! Originated from Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk.

Chocolate Chip Cookies – Toll House Chocolate Chip package.

A-camp shirt – Figured if she took my picture than everyone would be distracted by the tee-shirt and not notice that my eyes are closed in every photo. Go ahead, ask Marie how many photos she had to take to get that one.

True story about chocolate chip cookies: once i was in a anthropology class where this girl’s project was to learn how to make good chocolate chip cookies. So every Monday she would bring in cookies made from a different recipe for us all to taste and then we’d fill out a little survey about how good they were. That is how I learned that chopped nuts are actually delicious in chocolate chip cookies.

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